Charlie Savage

What are soldiers supposed to do?

So one of the interesting things about that video from those lawmakers who are all military intelligence veterans telling soldiers, you should not obey illegal orders, is they don't say what illegal orders they have in mind.

So one of the complaints actually by the Trump administration of what are you talking about?

Are you saying we've given illegal orders?

Which ones?

And, you know, it could be something about the fact that Trump has been deploying troops into cities and some of them are acting kind of like police officers.

It could be this boats operation.

But the Trump administration responds very fiercely to that video and calls them insurrectionists and opens investigations of them for daring to say this thing, which is actually just illegal truism.

And that, I think, is a contributing factor to why, as the country's attention is returned to legal controversies surrounding Trump's killing of people on these boats—

The reaction has been more fierce now than in September when it was still kind of a new thing that people were trying to wrap their heads around.

This legal cloud has been apparent since early September.

And Congress, controlled by the Republican Party, has not been particularly interested in performing much oversight until now.

And so as this effort unfolds in coming days and weeks, it will be interesting to see how broad the focus is, what questions lawmakers ask, and what information they're able to extract.

So...

Now that some Republicans on the Armed Services Committees appear to be interested in getting some answers, at least about this second missile strike in this first attack, Congress is therefore awakening.

We do not know at this stage how far this oversight effort will go.

It could be very searching.

It could be very limited.

And all of that is going to depend on the appetite of Republicans to make life uncomfortable for the Trump administration, which, as any observer of politics knows, is not something that is easy for them to do.

If they really want to get to the bottom of this, they have a number of things they can ask for and demand and push the limits to try to get.